SWELL SWILL: The gun's always greasy, the beer's always cold, and the popcorn's always free at the Silhouette in Allston.

See the losers in the best bars. Meet the winners in the dives.

— Neil Young

We find ourselves living in a city that's changing before our eyes. The humble, the homegrown, the timeworn — these things aren't valued like they once were. Where they do still exist, they're often being replaced with the shiny, the pricy, the soulless. But even in this dead-eyed era of creeping corporatism, pockets of character, authenticity, and independence do still exist.

Bars, we're talking about. Dive bars. Holes. Downmarket drinking dens. The kind of local places where the beer is but a couple bucks. Where the drinks are cold and stiff. Where the air wafts with the unmistakable but not-altogether-unpleasant tang of suds long since spilled. Where the neon shines bright and true and the jukebox plays good and loud.

Here, in no particular order, are some of our favorites.

CHARLIE'S KITCHEN | 10 Eliot Street, Cambridge | This Harvard Square haunt has a better beer selection than most proper dives. It also has the best punk-and-indie-stocked juke in town. Occasional live music? Gravy.

CROSSROADS IRISH PUB | 495 Beacon Street, Boston | Wednesday nights, buy a pitcher and get a free pizza. Thursday nights — sign up for the Beirut tournament! — get an order of hot wings with your pitcher. You can't beat that with a stick.

DOYLE'S CAFÉ | 3484 Washington Street, Jamaica Plain | Not exactly a "dive," per se, but the utter laidbackness and lack of pretension of this cavernous, creaky, character-rich, 127-year-old JP classic earns it a spot on this list. Try the Pickwick Ale.

THE DUGOUT | 722 Comm Ave, Boston | The name fits on a technical level: it's below street level! But to judge by the primary decor — BU hockey team pictures dating back to the '60s — it's otherwise a misnomer.

J.J. FOLEY'S | 117 East Berkeley Street and 21 Kingston Street, Boston | It's a rare dive bar indeed that features friendly-faced barkeeps in starched shirts and black ties. But that's the kind of class you're in for at these two Irish-Boston institutions.

THE MODEL CAFÉ | 7 North Beacon Street, Allston | I say "Model," you say "Mo-delle." Let's call the whole thing off. Then we'll crack open a couple beers, feed five five bucks into the jukebox, and argue about what songs to pick.

P.A.'S LOUNGE | 345 Somerville Avenue, Somerville | The P.A. stands for "Portuguese American." Long frequented by men from Madeira and the Azores, it now also plays host to hipsters seeking cheap booze and some of the best live music in town.

THE TAM | 222 Tremont Street, Boston | In a nifty nod to thrift, this Theater District stalwart glued countless pennies atop its tables. You'll need more than a few Abe Lincolns to order a beer here — but not too many more. (Try the Brubaker pounders.)

Psych in, psych out Philadelphia space-rock quartet Bardo Pond were barely into their headlining set at 1996's first-ever Deep Heaven festival when a group of older guys posing as cops stormed the Kingston Street recording-studio performance-space stairway armed with Maglites.

Photos: One Night in Boston 2010 STUFF Magazine presents photos taken in Boston's streets over nine hours on the night of August 22, 2010; here are a few of our favorites

The re-formed Humanoids remain hell bent for leather In the vortex of impossibility that is Coolidge Corner, it's not surprising that few residents realize there is a local rock demigod working at the neighborhood post office. "Strangely, there have been times when people knew who the Humanoids were, and it was awesome," says guitarist Johnny Machine. "As for co-workers, a lot of the guys know that I play in a band. But a lot of guys play in bands."

Potty Mouth spring out of Northampton On the top floor of Ally Einbinder's house in Western Mass, back behind her Creamsicle-colored bedroom, is a tiny attic with low ceilings, lit by one pink lamp, with walls covered in Xeroxed, vintage punk posters.

Barn Owl | Ancestral Star A quick heads-up to the folks at the Nature Channel or anyone working on one of those films about the formation of the Earth: this third LP from San Francisco instrumental duo Barn Owl has the type of glacially churning geological-genesis drone rock you're looking for in a soundtrack.

Old man riffer Bluesman James "T-Model" Ford is a survivor, and has been for a very long time.

INSIDE THE TEDXDIRIGO CONFERENCE | September 14, 2011 I arrived at TEDxDirigo on September 10 feeling rather less than confident about the state of world. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 — and the awful decade that unspooled from that sky-blue morning — was on my mind.